Peter Brant, contemporary American art collector, and his wife, the model Stephanie Seymour Brant, have turned a Connecticut fruit barn into a gallery for the display of their paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos. Located in Greenwich, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, which opens in late May, will mount two exhibitions per year drawn mainly from the approximately 600 works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and dozens of other artists that Brant has amassed over the last four decades. Architect Richard Gluckman has converted the interior of the 1902 stone barn into three skylite galleries and a video room in which the Brants, or guest curators, will organize single-artist or thematic shows of around 40 to 60 works. The fields outside will be home to monumental works such as Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, 1994-2000, and his topiary terrier Puppy, 1993, as well as Paul McCarthy’s Santa, 2002, and Richard Serra’s Ali-Frazier, 2001. “We believe it is part of our stewardship to exhibit and share as much of the collection as possible,” says Brant. The inaugural exhibition, which continues until February 2010, will present around 60 works made between 1978 and 2008 by the aforementioned artists as well as Maurizio Cattelan, Larry Clark, Francesco Clemente, John Currin, Eric Fischl, Karen Kilimnik, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel and Cindy Sherman, among others. After that there will be a one-man show devoted to the Swiss artist Urs Fischer.
Following is excerpts of Brant's interview with the The Art Newspaper.
The Art Newspaper: You’re a successful businessman. Why collect art and create a foundation?
Peter Brant: My whole philosophy of life revolves around aesthetics and I believe that you should try and sell the gospel. You need to preach and I’ve been doing that my whole life. It’s not something I decided to do four or five years ago…I took one hiatus between 1976 and 1982 when I was involved in horseracing, but besides that I’ve been a very serious collector. We never really acquired art for the purposes of decorating. We always collected because we were very interested in art and art history. We thought this was a good opportunity to give something back to the art world and to our community.
TAN: Do you intend to donate your collection to a museum?
PB: Ultimately, if I could afford to, I would like to have the collection put away in the foundation in perpetuity, to be able to show it and to be guaranteed that it would be shown…There are many possibilities. I’ve given works of art to probably 20 or 25 museums, including the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Whitney—and some stand today as pretty major things. Many times when you give works to museums they’re not put on display. I would very much like the foundation to ensure that the works would be shown to the public, and that could be done through an affiliation in the future with a museum, but it might be tied to some sort of condition or guarantee that the works would be exhibited over a period of time.
TAN: Why has your collecting focused on contemporary American artists?
PB: Stephanie and I love European art, but collecting is about focusing and doing it in depth. Occasionally I’ll branch out, like in the case of Urs Fischer, but I consider artists like that in a sense American because they live and work in America. For me Francesco Clemente is not an Italian artist, he’s an American artist. I concentrate on what I have some knowledge of and where I can obtain the knowledge easily.
TAN: In an interview with the collector Adam Lindemann you said, “As a collector, you really have to be thinking about what people’s tastes are going to be like ten or 15 years from now.” If you buy work you love, what do you care what other people will think in 15 years?
PB: You really have to be looking 15 or 20 years from now because an artist should be that much ahead of his time to forecast something aesthetically, politically or culturally…For instance, one of the earliest pictures that I bought was [Andy Warhol’s] Shot Blue Marilyn. Today that is like looking at the Mona Lisa. Marilyn Monroe has a totally different image than she had in 1964 when she passed away. It’s like Elton John’s song. We’ve looked at her life in retrospect since then and what Andy Warhol projected is something that now is very accurate—but nobody knew it at the time. The art world cognoscenti thought that picture was garish and photographic. It was not considered beautiful and not embraced by the art world…But that’s what Andy did, he was the radical artist at that time. To me it’s about looking at something visually or conceptually that is really going to change your view, something that is going to set a new aesthetic because of what it means culturally. Then it will become socialised and become beautiful. But it has to have some importance, some angst that changes your life in some sense. It has to be troublesome in some way.
TAN: So innovation is an important criterion?
PB: Yes, the beauty is not enough. If I look at a work by Elizabeth Peyton or Karen Kilimnik or John Currin, it’s not because it’s beautifully done. It stands for something that’s culturally important…One common thread in our collection is that a lot of these artists have gotten their ideas from an image—from going through a magazine or seeing something on a billboard or in a comic book—and it becomes iconic as an image that is available to us subconsciously in some way in our society. That’s what’s happened to our society: we’re looking at pictures.
TAN: You have many works by David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl and Francesco Clemente, who were especially prominent in the 1980s. Why did their stars fall?
PB: Their stars have not fallen to me. I think Julian is still an extremely important artist [and] an extremely creative man. He has no fear of branching out and becoming a film-maker and getting involved in music or architecture. I think that confuses people and infuriates them in a jealous way. They felt the same about Andy. He became a film-maker and when he branched out to do Hollywood films, which I was involved in, the art world resented it. But he became more famous in Europe for the films than for the art. You have art dealers who have only been in the business for five years who will comment on the likes of Schnabel, Salle, Fischl and Clemente and talk about them like they’re dinosaurs. Actually they are artists that are in the history books and important in their own right. [We] want to show them with some of the artists who are more, say, au courant than they are. But, again, Warhol is a god today; in the early 1980s he was almost persona non grata. People forget that. Why do you think so much of his late great work was in the estate?
TAN: How important is it for you that the work you acquire retains or generates value?
PB: I never bought art with the idea that the primary push was that the values are going to go up. I know I have a reputation of buying the right stuff but my primary push is that I have a feeling that something is really great. It’s playful, there’s genius in it and it gets my juices going—that’s why I buy works. And the ones that have appreciated the most are some of the ones that most advisors would tell you never to buy. A perfect example would be the [Jeff Koons] Puppy. I mean, what advisor would tell you to buy the Puppy? It’s maybe Jeff’s greatest work. I started to try and buy it in 1993 when he had just shown it in Aarhus and they couldn’t deliver it because it was in wood and structurally not fit. They had to do it in stainless steel and have it manufactured in Australia so it was a long wait. The idea to plant 80,000 flowers every year—nobody is going to tell you to buy something like that. But to me it was like the greatest public sculpture that I’d seen, as important as anything done in the last couple of hundred years, and [I knew that] one day this foundation would display works and this was a pivotal piece to show and have. It’s probably my favorite work of art.
TAN: Do you sometimes sell or trade works to raise funds for other purchases?
PB: Absolutely. I have done that all my life. If I am short and I have extra works of a certain period and don’t have the funding to buy something I need, I sell from time to time. But on balance I am a buyer…The last time was over a year ago when I sold some of Andy’s work that I felt that I had other examples of in order to raise money. In that case we were making a large acquisition for my company and [needed to raise money] because of the capital markets shutting down about a year and a half ago, so I did sell some things.
TAN: How is the downturn of the economy and the art market going to affect your collecting?
PB: In the last two or three months I actually have been buying. I find that the opportunity is there today to buy higher quality and it’s available at lower prices because more people need the liquidity and the money. For collectors it’s an opportunity to buy at a different level. The level that the art was at nine months to a year-and-a-half ago was an unrealistic level and an unhealthy level considering that it made it very difficult for collectors to collect. It’s much better that dealers have to think now about pricing their work more reasonably both in the primary and on the secondary market to entice collectors. It’s about time that happened…I feel that it’s very important that artists realise that the world is what it is today and they have to adjust and not be unreasonable. [That means] scaling back projects that are not realistic in today’s economy and depending more on being creative and having brilliant ideas that don’t have to be executed in gold or platinum or diamonds.
TAN: What about Damien Hirst? Did you buy at the Hirst auction at Sotheby’s?
PB: No. I think Damien is a great artist, but it’s the old saying: You live by the sword, you die by the sword. He kind of maximized the commerciality of his business. I believe that the volume that you turn out and the way in which it’s executed has some meaning in the traditional sense in the art world. That has no bearing on how great an artist you are—Picasso, Monet and Warhol, a lot of the greatest artists have done a huge amount of volume. But you have to be prepared to go through those moments when the supply is going to outdo the demand. I think I have one very early Hirst Apothecary cabinet piece done in 1989 that I bought probably in 1991. I have had other works by him, but I did not buy anything in that sale.
TAN: Does the current climate favor auction houses or dealers?
PB: I think there are better opportunities for dealers only because the transition in the auction houses has been so severe. They were very strong over a period of six years, then as the market turned they naturally got hit because of the guarantees they had out there. Everything that was part of their formula for growth all of a sudden hit in the ninth inning. It’s a temporary hit, but in the meantime the dealers have an opportunity to do private sales and secondary-market transactions. What the auction houses have to do is scale down their evening sales for contemporary art and really concentrate on getting the best quality. How do you do that when the prices come down and you can’t offer anything attractive to the [consignors]? They have to still continue to actively pursue quality things…if they [once] had 60 works in an evening sale they should have perhaps 30 and make them really good. Dealers have sour grapes about the auction houses because they’ve eroded into their business especially on the secondary market for private sales, which is a very stupid place for the auction houses to be. They don’t have the expertise and you’re competing against your customers—the largest portion of customers of the auction houses is the art dealers.
I think the auction houses are making some mistakes now by trying to underestimate where the market is to increase the percentage of their sell-through. That’s very destructive to the art market. Just like they were responsible for increasing the values faster than they should have, they also are now responsible for decreasing the values faster than they should be. That’s because some moron in these auction houses, a financial guy, says they think the market’s gone down 50% so everything’s 50% lower—every appraisal that is given for a bank on collateral, every insurance appraisal. That’s a self-defeating position. I don’t think the market has deteriorated as much as the press believes that it has because I’m talking to dealers that are doing business. They might be doing business at a lower level, but it’s not 50% or 60% below where it was a year or two ago. For quality things it might be 25% lower.
TAN: A recent debate organized by Robert Rosenkranz of Delphi Fund postulated that the art market is less ethical than the stock market. Would you agree?
PB: I think that there’s no comparison. I believe that the country is in the condition that it’s in today largely because of what transpired on Wall Street. I’m not a great fan of such a large population of people that are effectively controlling our resources that don’t really make or produce anything. What got us into trouble was the packaging of these mortgages and the lack of contact with individuals on the street, and this idea to package it and sell it off to someone else—mortgages, credits, derivatives and the whole works. The transparency in the art world is 100 times better and greater than on Wall Street. The very nature of the art market being entrepreneurial and having such a cast of characters involved, it forms like a knitting group of people that are yakking away like old ladies. It might be regulated on Wall Street but nobody understands it. Can you read Citibank’s balance sheet? Who the hell can read that? You can have a masters in business administration or accounting and you can’t read that balance sheet. It’s impossible. I’ve had a lot of dealings with purchasing and selling through these auction companies over the last 40 years, and I think today they’ve regulated themselves a lot more, especially since the anti-trust case that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Sotheby’s and Christie’s. These companies are so large with so many employees that if anything like that went on it would be known, and I don’t believe that they do that. They’re very strict on setting reserves, and people can’t bid up to the reserves.
